Thursday, November 27, 2014

I write this post as this Month of St. Clive is set to close.
In other words, Clive Staples Lewis, patron saint for many an intellectual
doubter, was born and died in November (116 and 51 years ago, respectively).

At a presentation about my research
and subsequent book on Lewis—and I extolled the virtues of his wise and winsome
writing and was asked,

Why is Lewis still the one that
people cite? When will a new Lewis arise?

The answer didn’t take long to
formulate and still seems reasonably clear to me: That new St. Clive will have
to have the intellectual goods, will have to care to translate his insights effectively,
and will have to engage the imagination through story.

First
of all, a new Lewis will need to be brilliant—that’s the opening bid. He has to
possess raw cerebral skills and cultural training. One of Lewis’s academic
degrees at Oxford was Greats (or Literae
Humaniores), the study of the best, the “greatest” of ancient philosophy
and ancient history. As the Oxford scholar Alsadair McGrath points out, this
program was the jewel in the crown of Oxford’s curriculum in the early 20th
century, intended for its brightest lights to learn from the past as England
sought to guide itself into the unknowns of a transitory century.

Second,
Lewis cared to communicate; he was a brilliant translator, which immediately
presents a question of why. Why not
simply stay in the fields of the academy instead of trying to write for a
broader audience? I once asked well-known commentator on Lewis and founding
member of the New York C. S. Lewis
Society, Jim Como, about the reasons this brilliant academic didn’t just
stay in the safe cocoon of Oxford University. He replied quite simply (and I
paraphrase): “Because no one else was doing it, and Lewis saw it as his
Christian duty.” Lewis stated this quite simply in his introduction to Mere Christianity:

Ever since I became a Christian I
have thought that the best, perhaps the only, service I could do for my
unbelieving neighbors was to explain and defend the belief that has been common
to nearly all Christians at all times.

This question hung around in my
mind, and as I reflected further on this puzzle, I discerned another reason: Lewis simply believed that Christianity was
true, and he was convinced that truth was worth arguing for.

(By
the way, he pined for others in this guide of sorts. As he wrote with palapable
frustration:

People praise me as a ‘translator,’ but what I want is to be the
founder of a school of ‘translation.’ I am nearly forty-seven. Where
are my successors? Anyone can learn to do it if they wish...I feel I’m
talking rather like a tutor – forgive me. But it is just a technique and
I’m desperately anxious to see it widely learned.

Without others alongside, and sensing
this critical need, he took up the task of translation and became the
best-known Christian apologist of the twentieth century.)

Third,
Lewis engaged the imagination. The most enduring feature of Lewis’s legacy—and
indeed that of his close friend, J.R.R. Tolkien—remains beautiful, enchanting
narratives. As Lewis is put it, his imagination was “baptized” by reading
George MacDonald long before he confessed faith in God or specifically in
Christ. He sought to do the same.

Or put another way, if Time magazine was right to call him, not
too many years ago, today’s “hottest theologian,” what else does Lewis say to
us today? Lewis would tell us to engage the imagination, not simply our
reasoning. St. Clive was more than willing to use fiction to present the truths
of Christian life. (And, let it be said, this imagination produced the
legendary Chronicles of Narnia fantasy series, which has sold about 120 million
copies to date.) Here’s then a central feature of his acts of imagination: if
we imagine that that God exists, what would the world look like? Or as he wrote
in a 1962 letter,

Suppose there were a Narnian
world and it, like ours, needed redemption. What kind of incarnation and
Passion might Christ be supposed to undergo there?

That's what Lewis is fiction and
even just analogies he peppered throughout his writings did. If anything, this
is what cognitive science tells us—we hardly ever rationally reflect without
also simultaneously feeling. And culturally, this is particularly important. Consider
this: What are the factors today that have influence in our country? What I see
are grand stories that we read in novels and watch in movies. (Indeed superheroes
will be with us forever.)

Will new St. Clives arise? They’ll
have to have the intellectual goods, an acumen for translation, and a fecund
imagination. And what would Lewis say today? With fourth Chronicles of Narnia in production, maybe St. Clive is still
speaking. But it would be great if he were joined by other voices.